They are one of the largest cultural groups in Papua New Guinea, numbering over 250,000 people (based on the population of Hela of 249,449 at the time of the 2011 national census).

Unlike many other Highland peoples, they have not relinquished much of their cultural expressions to the new and innovative ways of the colonizers and outsiders who settled to live among them in 1951.

The Huli landscape consists of patches of primary forests, reed-covered marshes, kunai grasslands, scrub brush, and mounded gardens traversed by rivers, small streams and man-made ditches which serve as drainage canals, boundary markers, walking paths, and defensive fortifications.

There is every indication the Huli have lived in their region for many thousands of years and recount lengthy oral histories relating to individuals and their clans.

The Huli were not known to Europeans until November 1934, when at least fifty of them were killed by the Fox brothers, two adventurers unsuccessfully looking for gold who had just parted with the more famous explorers Mick and Dan Leahy.